Shirato Sanpei

Associated names:
白土 三平
Okamoto Noboru (real name - 岡本 登)

Biography
Okamoto "Shirato Sanpei" Noboru (February 15th, 1932 — October 8th, 2021) was a Japanese mangaka. One of the pioneers of the gekiga genre, he was well-known for his social critique and realistic drawing style. He debuted as a mangaka in 1957, and began publishing his first popular and long-running series Ninja Bugeichou in 1959.

In 1964, he helped Katsuchi Nagai found the manga anthology magazine Garo; the first story published in the magazine was his series Kamui, which is often considered his most important and influential work. Deeply influenced by marxism, the series touches upon the inherent discriminations that can be found in a feudal society and is a denounciation of the treatment of the burakumin, a Japanese social minority.

Kamui ran until 1971, and was then restarted in 1988 in the magazine Big Comic, for which Sanpei had worked in the meantime.

Shirato Sanpei passed away on October 8th, 2021 due to aspiration pneumonia. His brother, Okamoto Tetsuji, who had worked with him as his assistant, passed away four days later of interstitial pneumonia.